One of accusers in Lorain Head Start child-molestation case, now 22, beginning to have doubts if abuse ever occurred

If he closes his eyes, the young man can picture his seat on Nancy Smith's Head Start school
bus.

When he opens them, the memory of his 4-year-old self, a chattering boy with tousled blond curls, is gone. He's just a 22-year-old surrounded by sex offenders in an Idaho prison.

For nearly his whole life, Will has believed that he was one of the children molested by Smith and Joseph Allen, an unemployed sanitation worker, in 1993.

He can recite how the preschoolers were forced to touch each other, how they were stuck with needles and raped. He can tell about the magazine picture of a man shot in the head that the kids said their abuser used to frighten them with. He recalls boarding a plane to return to Lorain County to testify.

But Will can't actually remember being abused. And now, he is beginning to wonder if it ever really happened.

His words years ago helped convict Smith and Allen of sexually abusing the preschoolers, who attended the program for low-income children.

Under questioning in court, he said Allen was near the school and bus. He pointed to the convicted sex offender as a man who grabbed and hurt his arm. Will's mother, the prosecution's lead witness, said Allen taught her son something he called "humping."

A jury convicted Smith and Allen of working together to molest the children, despite their insistence that they had never met.

Both served nearly 15 years in prison
before they were
released on a technicality
. They remain free because a judge who recently reviewed the case believes they are innocent, though the Ohio Supreme Court has since ordered him to resentence them.

Clearly, Will isn't the first person with serious questions about what did -- or didn't -- happen to the kids who rode Smith's bus nearly 18 years ago.

And uneasiness has lingered about, among other things, the way the case was investigated and how the children were questioned.

For most of his life Will didn't question what had happened. He just accepted that he was a victim.

But he said that when his mother, Emily, died in September, he discovered that much of his life had been layered with lies.

He said he learned that she wasn't his biological mother. That the woman who he said beat him so severely that he was taken into foster care for eight months when he was 11 was instead his second cousin. And his father wasn't his father either.

He started to wonder if there were other lies he was told -- and if they led to lies of his own. New questions raised about the case added to his uncertainty.

The Plain Dealer is not using Will's full name because it generally does not identify people who have been or allege to have been victims of sexual abuse. Even with questions raised in the case, he is considered a victim.

Inmate wrestling with his past

While Will's memories -- as tangled as the case itself
--
won't help prove the guilt or innocence of Smith and Allen, the soft-spoken young man has his own reasons for needing the truth.

From his prison dorm in Idaho, where he's serving time for a burglary, Will is struggling with the damage he believes the case has done to his life.

"I can't help but question it," he said. "I want to be able to get the truth out. But I also don't want to face the fact that maybe it didn't happen."

That is because when he was 13 he molested a 4-year-old in a way that counselors thought mimicked what had happened to him. He was locked in a treatment facility for three years after that.

"I have to live with the fact that I created a victim every day," he said. "I can't tell you how guilty it makes me. I have to live with being a sex offender and that all sex offenders are hated.

"What if I did that and it didn't even really happen to me? That's really hard to think about," he said in a recent phone interview.

Experts who study memory say that since Will was so young, it's probably unlikely that memories can be unfurled. And it may be irrelevant as it pertains to becoming an abuser.

"We do have these things called false memories," said
Maggie Bruck
, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. "They can be strong and can be confident. You can really believe something is true and that it happened to you and it didn't.

"If he was brought up to believe that he was abused and was treated as an abused child, then where else would these behaviors come from," she said.

Interviews of kids proved problematic

Prosecutors did not charge Smith and Allen with abusing Will, but he was among the children whose parents believed they were molested and who testified for the prosecution.

Will recently reviewed his testimony, but it didn't necessarily help him bring the events of 1993 into a clear focus.

Both prosecutors and defense attorneys in the Lorain case have agreed for years that the methods used to interview children were problematic, though the prosecutors maintain that certain details of the kids' accounts could not have been made up.

The children were questioned in front of their parents, who often spoke for their kids and related details from their own conversations with other parents.

Scenarios and names were suggested to the children, and when they didn't give detectives or social workers the answers they sought, questions were repeated again and again.

Many of those tactics had already been discredited at the time, but proper training for police and social workers was not yet widespread.

Professionals now try to use open-ended questioning that allows children to narrate rather than respond to specific questions, said
Lauren McAliley
, a pediatric nurse practitioner who specializes in child advocacy and protection at Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital.

Will was first interviewed by police detectives in May 1993, soon after allegations that one of his classmates was abused hit the news.

Transcripts and audiotapes of the interviews show that his mother, Emily, did most of the talking during the session.

She told the detectives -- with her son in the room -- that she had caught her son in his bedroom with his pants down "humping" a stuffed animal and that he told her a boy at school had taught him. She then said he told her that his bus driver Nancy Smith's boyfriend showed him how to "hump" on the bus. She told police he later
said
it was a man named Joseph.

When Will
was asked by detectives, he denied anyone hurt him.

Almost six months later, Will and a half-dozen other children were summoned to the Lorain police station. They stood on chairs or sat on their parents' laps and peered at several men on the other side of one-way glass.

Most of them couldn't pick Joseph Allen out of the lineup. Will was brought in three separate times.

Police asked him to look at the men, to look at their faces, and to pick out "Joseph."

At one point, Will picked up a phone and mimicked then-police Capt. Cel Rivera, ordering the men in the line to step forward and move back. When he picked a man who was not Allen, they prodded him to look again and again. They asked him more than a dozen times, a tape of the sessions shows.

During part of the lineup, Will sat on his mother's lap, a video of the session shows. When Allen stepped forward, Will jerked, said 'ah' and looked down at his mother's hand on his leg as if he'd been pinched, but he didn't pick Allen.

During the trial, Will's mother testified that her son was scared that day and that he picked out every man except for Allen. She said he was so afraid he ran from the room in tears.

The video of the lineup, which the jury did not see, doesn't show that happening.

Will's mother also testified during the trial about things she didn't tell police during earlier interviews. Specifically, she told the jury that when her son went to board the bus at the school one day, Allen grabbed his arm so hard it left a mark.

The differences in the stories Will's mother told police and what she told a jury led Smith's attorney to press for a mistrial, which was denied.

Later, other lawyers sued the Head Start program on behalf of some of the victims and their families, who were eventually awarded millions of dollars. Will and his family were not a part of that action and did not receive any compensation.

Over the years, Will said he and the woman he believed to be his mother talked only sporadically about the abuse case. The two had moved to Idaho shortly before the trial and they returned to Lorain to testify.

She collected newspaper articles about the case and she
would ask him what he remembered about it.

"She would question me about it," he said. "I couldn't give her a straight answer because I didn't know."

He remembers her expressing doubt about it at least one time.

"She said, 'I don't think it really happened. I think you are just making it up.' "

Even back in 1993, Will -- who testified with a big wad of gum in his mouth -- seemed to be struggling with what happened.

When the prosecutor asked him about Allen, he said: "Well, he grabbed me on the arm and I can't remember."